Lync Education Event 4th March 2011 summary

Robin Chan, Voice TSP, UK Incubation at Microsoft Reading ran the Lync Education event on 4th March 2011 at Cardinal Place, London. Here is his summary of the event.

This event was the first we have run dedicated to Lync 2010 for the education segment and very well received and extremely popular. The event was oversubscribed, on the day we had 76 attendees with a mixture of people from universities, colleges, schools and local authorities.

The aim of the event was to drive awareness of Lync in general, how it can deliver significant cost savings, while improving productivity, collaboration and the enhancing teaching environment. A big focus for Lync is the delivery of Enterprise Voice, essentially the ability for Lync to be deployed as an full blown telephony solution, i.e. PBX replacement while also providing true unified communications.

The full agenda is available here, we started by discussing our vision of education and unified communications, followed by an overview of Lync. We had an series of very involving live demos which stepped through functionality available out of the box and how it could be applied in an education environment. We had session dedicated to the telephony functionality which pointed out the potential costs savings. We then had some excellent presentations from our customers talking about their experiences of deploying Lync: